Three Flags

Three American flags are stacked one in front of another, each smaller than the last, projecting out toward the viewer in layers of pigmented wax. Jasper Johns painted familiar, ready-made signs - flags, targets, numbers - things 'the mind already knows,' freeing him to focus on the surface and the act of painting. Now in the Whitney Museum, Three Flags is a pivotal work between Abstract Expressionism and Pop - the most loaded of national symbols treated as a neutral motif, at once instantly recognizable and made strange by its layered, hand-built, oddly receding form.